Rewriting the Story of Middle America

Sarah Vogel and the story of the farm crisis of the 1980s

This is the mid-week edition of Men Yell At Me, a newsletter that explores the intersection of politics and our bodies, written by me, an author and journalist living in Iowa. If you like it, you can subscribe. If you don’t, you can still subscribe!

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March 16, 1983, Des Moines, IA: About 100 people—farmers, members of their families, and supporters—gather to listen to speakers from the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition at a rally at the state capitol. Farmers are lobbying for minimum prices for corn and soybeans and for a moratorium on farm foreclosures. (Image via Getty)

I once wrote a story about a town that was burning to the ground, one house at a time. Gladbrook, Iowa, had at least five fires in 2016, more the following year. Based on news reports, most of the fires were due to faulty wiring. There was no conspiracy. Just old houses and businesses, long in need of repair, burning down one at a time.

Each fire was treated like a separate event, rather than what they were: a symptom of Reagan-era policies that had plundered the land, leaving it empty and impoverished.

This is the Midwest, small towns, boarded up, rotting, burning, consolidating, closing. Small farms taken over by industrial concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOS) and corporate farms, where the runoff is poisoning the water.

If you read one version of the story of America, this happened by accident. Market forces drove American farms to a crisis in the 1980s. Catastrophic weather events plus Jimmy Carter halting grain shipments to the Soviet Union, resulting in surplus grain unsold rotting in barns, and farmers forced to take high-interest loans and unable to pay them back, resulting in widespread foreclosures, which devastated Middle America, in a way that is still felt today. 

But if you read The Farmer’s Lawyer, a memoir by Sarah Vogel, the narrative completely changes. Vogel was a lawyer who worked for the Treasury Department under the Carter administration. When Reagan was elected, Vogel found herself an out-of-work single mother and moved back to her native North Dakota. 

There she found a crisis. Hundreds of farmers were losing their homes and livelihoods to foreclosures that didn’t have to happen. The crisis was created by the new head of the Farmers Home Administration, Charles W. Shuman, who issued a directive titled “Administrative Notice 580” in 1981 to reduce loan delinquencies by 23 percent on average by March 1982. State directors were offered merit pay bonuses for foreclosures. The result was disastrous. 

It’s easy to see the Middle of America as an empty expanse, instead of what it is: intentionally disemboweled. 

In response, Vogel became a de facto Erin Brockovich for farmers, filing a class action lawsuit that alleged that the government was illegally foreclosing on the farmers, failing to follow a 1978 deferral law. The law outlined that farmers should be offered a loan deferral if the circumstances of the foreclosure were out of their control. They weren’t being offered the deferral. What’s worse, even before the foreclosures, the USDA was seizing income, making it impossible for the farmers to feed themselves or their animals. 

As she fought for the farmers, many of whom paid her in food, Vogel herself went into debt and faced foreclosure. Vogel was locked out of her office because she couldn’t pay rent, she wasn’t able to pay her phone bill and had to rely on her clients to loan her money. She describes carting her toddler son along with her to meetings, his crayons melting in the back of a car rented by a Time magazine photographer.

The case Coleman v. Block was filed on March 11, 1983, on behalf of nine named plaintiffs representing 8,400 North Dakota family farmers. The case resulted in an injunction prohibiting the USDA from foreclosing on 240,000 FmHA borrowers nationwide.

Whatever happened could have been far worse. But it was bad enough already.

I think of the desperation that drove farmers to death by suicide and even, in some extreme cases, murder. I think of the empty eyes of the store windows. I think of the historical society in LeMars, where the second floor is a graveyard of pianos from all the small churches closed up, because the farms failed and families moved. 

It’s easy to see the Middle of America as an empty expanse, instead of what it is: intentionally disemboweled. 

The story we tell ourselves about the Farm Crisis of the 1980s is that it was just another tragedy. Just one of those things. In a now out-of-print biography about Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, author Eric Woosen writes that Grassley stepped in to provide aid for farmers and noted that no one saw the farm crisis coming. As if it was a random act of god, instead of a calculated policy that saw people and places as line items on a budget spreadsheet.

A 1984 article in the Washington Post titled “Agriculture Broadens Aid To Debt-Plagued Farmers” announces that Shuman will be broadening aid efforts to farmers. The article is short and contains no mention that Shuman authorized the foreclosures he was now deferring. That he was the one authorizing aid to the farmers he hurt. As if the bully making people on the playground hit themselves suddenly stopped and demanded a “thank you.”

So much of the cultural narrative about the Middle of America is that it is forgotten. But what we don’t talk about is why we’ve forgotten. And we forgot because if we remembered, if we truly remembered, we have to face an inconvenient reality about our heroes and our villains.

The problems Vogel fought in the 1980s remain ever present. Discriminatory lending has hurt Native American farmers and Black farmers. 

In 2019, thanks to Trump’s trade war with China, farmer’s were again facing another looming crisis. In September 2019, bankruptcies for farmers across America rose by 24 percent. The American Farm Bureau Federation reported 91 percent of farmers and farmworkers have financial issues that affect their mental health, and 87 percent are afraid they’ll lose their farms.

All of this exacts a price. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the suicide rate in rural America was 45 percent higher than in urban areas. In 2015, the suicide rate for farmers and ranchers was 32 out of every 100,000 people in 2015.

Thanks to a glut of pandemic aid, the crisis for now was averted. But nothing much has changed. The Middle of America is still trapped by the narrative of hard work and resilience. But resilience is something we celebrate, because it’s far easier to fetishize resiliency over great odds than to recognize who caused those odds in the first place. 

Right now, in Middle America, we are busy rewriting another narrative. This one about the pandemic. This one about responsibility. This one about the human lives sacrificed so we didn’t have to slaughter hogs. I’m worried we will forget. I’m worried that 40 years from now my daughter will read a book about the pandemic and who is responsible and be angry, like me, that so much of American tragedy was just a result of political leaders who saw numbers instead of human lives.

But for now, Vogel’s book is a necessary counter-narrative to the story we tell ourselves about the land, about hard work and bootstraps. About misfortune and bad luck. She writes with the sturdy conviction of an activist and the wonky knowledge of a good lawyer. And the moral conviction of a woman who saw it all too clearly and does not want us to forget.

Further Reading:

While writing this, I remembered the story of Steven Jenkins, a farmer who murdered two bankers in 1983. Also, this really important investigation into discrimination against Black farmers by the USDA. Earlier this year, I wrote that I was worried we would forget all of this. Sarah Vogel’s website has a really great re-cap of all the changes to the USDA since Coleman v. Block. Also, please buy Sarah’s book.

And on Twitter someone shared this story about a family farm in Georgia, a death by suicide, and Donald Trump.

Another reader sent in the story of a farmer from Lone Tree, Iowa who murdered the president of Hills Bank and then his neighbor.

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Men Yell at Me is a newsletter about the places where our bodies and politics collide and yes, the occasional yelling man. Learn more about it and me (Lyz) here. You can sign up to receive the free weekly email, sent on Wednesdays, which includes interviews, essays, and original reporting. The Friday email is a weekly round-up of dinguses, drinks, and links. On Monday I have a subscribers-only open thread where we discuss politics, food, dogs, our bodies, and more.